FORT LAUDERDALE — My parents arrived at my apartment in West Los Angeles to visit.
Today was the day, but not the kind of day they assumed or even wanted — a typical parent-child outing where we picked a place to have lunch at a cozy eatery in Fox Hills, a hilltop, tree-filled neighborhood near Culver City, just east of Marina del Rey and north of Los Angeles International Airport, where my dad finished a distinguished career in aviation.
I answered the door and asked my parents to come in. Sitting them both down, they could sense I had something important to say, something my brothers and close friends already knew:
“I’m gay.”
As I began to sob, my mother rolled her eyes and just sat there, looking around the room at anything but me. My father, on the other hand, approached me and put his arm around my shoulder.
“It doesn’t matter. We love you,” he said.
As one of eight Catholic children raised on a family farm in Iowa, my mother remained distant for much of the next few hours, days, weeks and months. As time went by, I thought the worst was over and she and I had reached the kind of love and understanding we enjoy today.
But one day my mother left me something I would never forget, a newspaper clipping with some of the old mail and correspondence she would set aside for me occasionally that was still delivered to what had been my permanent address until I left home for college when I was 18.
The clipping was actually an advertisement for how to cope with sexual deviancy through a form of conversion therapy that would attempt to change my sexual orientation and/or gender identity. With my college education, I knew better, so this time it was my time to roll my eyes.
But many people younger than I aren’t as fortunate to have a mind of their own, or the confidence, maturity and social support to resist emotional attempts to alter who they are fundamentally.
Putting the sheer will power of Buddhist monks aside for the moment, sexual orientation is not a choice, like abortion, or a disease or some kind of health condition that can be repressed or treated over time with the right mix of drugs, electrodes, heterosexual pornography and clinical psychiatry. It’s an aspect of our human condition stretching as far back as Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s psycho-sexual continuum fans wide.
But not everybody agrees, obviously. So now, as the acronym LGBT becomes more ubiquitous in headlines and on lips around the United States, we are witnessing great strides at the local level to resist authoritarianism meant to mold us into something we are not — and thereby address a reason for suicide by LGBT youth, according to the American Psychological Association.
This week, the nonprofit LGBT group Basic Rights Oregon asked state lawmakers to back legislation that would outlaw any treatment seeking to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a minor. Under the bill, social workers and licensed psychologists or psychiatrists would be barred from practicing conversion therapy on people under age 18.
The Portland group’s effort is part of a national push to prevent mental health care providers from practicing conversion therapy. Laws banning the practice have passed in New Jersey, California and Washington, D.C., where the National Center for Lesbian Rights played a key role.
A dozen other states are looking at similar legislation, including New York and Florida.
In Tallahassee, a bill introduced by Sen. Jeff Clemens (D-Lake Worth) last December would ban the practice among licensed therapists in Florida. Rep. David Richardson (D-Miami Beach), Florida’s first openly gay elected official, has introduced companion legislation in the House. Richardson’s bill only applies to conversion therapy offered by licensed professionals, not religious and other non-professional organizations.
Pro-family organizations generally claim that the broad language of current legislation and existing laws violate a parent’s right to choose what is best for their child. They also argue that because therapy is speech, it is protected under the First Amendment.
But the majority of American parents seeking this form of treatment for their children are unlicensed, ignorant and merely locked into a values-based fantasy of who and what their children would, could or should be. They are often blinded by love, not hate, like my mother. However, those under the microscope now are the real culprits: doctors and religiously-motivated psychologists who earn hefty sums from a fool’s errand which can no longer withstand the disinfecting light of day.
